This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood (16 page)

The two issues were related. Lily’s planned adventure wasn’t just a quest for companionship. Her only regret about breaking with Henry was that he was obviously reasonably well off and, while she wasn’t a mercenary woman and money wasn’t her prime consideration (we occupied that position), these were
days when women were much more heavily dependent on the income of their husbands.

The ‘three young professionals’ she had cleaned for had moved on by this time and were no longer available for advice and guidance. Linda was. She argued that as we had Steve’s address in East Dulwich, Lily must write explaining how desperate we were. To Lily this seemed like begging, but she swallowed her pride and wrote to Steve. There was no reply. And there were no more postal orders.

Early that year Linda began to go out with Jimmy Carter, a fifteen-year-old lovable rogue, one of seven children in a family renowned for being ‘hard’. They lived in St Anne’s Road, on the cusp of Notting Hill and Shepherd’s Bush, and the patriarch was a rag-and-bone collector – a totter (Jimmy always swore that Hercules, the horse in the TV series
Steptoe and Son
, had belonged to his dad). Jimmy had already left school and worked with his father selling on the scrap metal and second-hand tat gathered on the cart. Unfortunately, his dad also dealt in manure, which meant that Jimmy sometimes arrived to take Linda out carrying a certain aroma that was noticeable even in our unsanitary conditions. Lily would heat up the copper in our cobbled-together basement bathroom and insist that he had a bath.

Although she liked Jimmy, she never saw him as being remotely suitable for her daughter. In the end neither did Linda, but his big smile and tall, gangling frame were part of our lives for over a year before they split up. It was an eventful year for us and Jimmy Carter, who became a regular breezy presence in the house, played a part in it.

Jimmy would give me the odd cigarette on the understanding
that I wouldn’t tell Lily. But when she eventually went back to work later that year at the kiosk next to Ladbroke Grove station, she was allowed free cigarettes to supplement her wages and used to bring home a packet of ten Rothmans King Size for me every week.

The health implications of smoking had yet to be widely understood. Back then everyone smoked, and everyone smoked everywhere. On the Metropolitan line tube I took to school, there was just one carriage on each train for non-smokers, and that was usually empty. I don’t think Lily’s many hospital clinicians, or Dr Tanner, ever advised her to give it up. As for me taking it up, Lily saw that as a rite of passage.

I certainly considered it to be a badge of manhood. As Lily and I passed each other cigarettes or (once he knew it was OK with Lily) I accepted one of Jimmy’s Player’s tipped, I felt I was forming an adult bond with them. The ever-sensible Linda, on the other hand, became devoutly anti-smoking – thanks to an early advisory lesson at Fulham County, which included the scrutiny of the blackened lungs of a dead smoker, preserved in a glass container. ‘I want to keep my lungs pink,’ she’d say.

Lily was surprisingly relaxed, too, about all the lessons I was missing. It must have been a strain on her finances, since she had to provide a meal for me that I would have got free at school. Having pushed me so hard at Bevington, she didn’t seem concerned about my absence from Sloane. It was as if the fact that I was a grammar-school boy was enough in itself to secure my future.

She certainly believed my eye problem to be worse than it was. She had absolute trust in Dr Tanner but being well aware that I was miserable at Sloane it seems unlikely that she
wouldn’t have suspected some degree of exaggeration, if not downright malingering. Maybe she had bigger worries on her mind; perhaps – just perhaps – she liked having me with her while she prepared to go back into hospital for more tests. This time she was not going in for diagnosis of the complaint but to work out what to do about it.

If that was the case, I must have provided scant comfort or companionship since I spent almost all my time alone in my room, following the pop charts, playing my guitar and reading (and re-reading) my books. By now my interest in football had become an obsession and I invented my own league, featuring teams like London Rovers and Haden Park and over-populated with players going by the names Alan or Johnson. Lily paid for my
Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly
, ordered from Maynard’s, the newsagents, and preserved in good condition, apart from the double-page centre-spread team line-ups that I pinned on my damp bedroom walls. I produced my own magazine every month, too, called
Soccer News
, full of team news and ‘photographs’ (my shaky attempts at drawing and colouring in). Lily indulged me by reading it and taking out a monthly subscription. A
Soccer News Annual
was also produced in a hardback ruled notebook Steve had left behind.

I was constantly hungry. I’ve never forgotten that emptiness and craving for food. As always, Lily did her best with what we had, but she was feeling very low and on drugs that made her listless. Her stale bread floating in Oxo speciality appeared regularly on the menu.

Once Lily had gone into hospital, Linda made a momentous decision for a fourteen-year-old. One evening, as she, Jimmy and I sat in our little back room, cold and hungry, Jimmy and I
flicking fag ash into the fireplace as we huddled round its fading glow, she made up her mind that she needed to confront Steve herself, face to face.

Using an
A to Z
and the London Transport maps in her school library, Linda devised a route by tube and bus to the address we had for Steve in Dulwich. If there had been no alternative, I’m quite sure she would have gone there on her own. As it was, Jimmy volunteered to accompany her. There was no question of me going, and I wasn’t asked. While I admired my sister’s bravery, I couldn’t match it. She didn’t want to see Steve again any more than I did, but she felt she had to force him to face up to responsibilities he was obviously keen to forget. Lily was not to be informed until after the event. For once the ‘Don’t tell Alan’ policy had been overruled. This time it was ‘Don’t tell Lily.’

Linda and Jimmy set off one Sunday afternoon when they reckoned Steve was most likely to be at home. He and Vera were living in a street of tall, highly desirable Victorian houses off Lordship Lane. It was a world away from the slums of Southam Street. Linda and Jimmy found the right house, where Steve and Vera evidently occupied the two upper floors. At the top of the flight of steep steps climbed by our intrepid reporter when he first discovered Steve’s whereabouts there was now a bell marked ‘Johnson’ which Linda pressed. They waited.

It was Vera who answered the door. Small and round with swollen legs – very different from the woman we had imagined – she spoke precisely, in a Home Counties accent. Linda told her the purpose of the visit and Vera invited them in, calling up
the stairs to Steve that his daughter was here with her boyfriend. Steve may already have seen Linda from the upstairs window, but she felt that Vera’s advance warning suggested he hadn’t, and therefore needed to be prepared for the shock.

As Jimmy stood uncomfortably by the door to the flat, Linda marched in and went straight on to the attack. She had no intention of engaging in polite conversation or of staying for a minute longer than she had to. The room, she told me later, was neat and clean, carpeted and warm. In the corner sat a boy of around Linda’s age: Vera’s son, Michael, who gazed quizzically at the visitors trying to work out why they’d come. He lived with Steve and his mother and apparently had no contact with his biological father.

Steve had been sitting in his armchair by the gas fire. His ginger hair was, as always, combed and Brylcreemed straight back from his freckled forehead. He looked shaken and pale.

‘You haven’t sent us any money for weeks,’ Linda announced. ‘Mum’s in hospital and can’t work and we’ve got nothing.’

Steve tried to make excuses. ‘Things haven’t been easy …’ he began.

‘They’ve not been easy for us either and we need money badly,’ Linda cut in defiantly.

She stood her ground and in the uncomfortable silence that followed Steve crossed the floor and disappeared into the bedroom, returning a couple of minutes later with two £10 notes. Three weeks’ money, much less than he owed but more than Linda expected. She relaxed a little.

Vera brewed some tea. Jimmy offered round his cigarettes and they sat talking awkwardly for half an hour. From what Linda gleaned, Steve was a changed man. There was a piano in
the corner but he no longer played the pubs and clubs. Painting and decorating now took precedence.

He invited Linda and Jimmy to visit again and to bring me with them. Linda rose to leave, thanking Vera for the tea. As she and Jimmy headed to the door Steve said: ‘By the way, Vera is having a baby. You’re going to have a new brother or sister.’

Only once the mission had been accomplished was Lily informed. As soon as she was out of hospital and got me on my own she laid into me about going to see Steve. In what must have been an extraordinarily difficult commitment for her to make, she promised she’d come with me if only I’d agree to visit him.

I was adamant. I refused to see Steve in any circumstances, whether it was with Linda or with Lily. Linda was more accommodating. She told me that although she had felt like a traitor sitting there drinking tea with Steve and Vera, she would go back when the baby was born to see our half-sibling. She and Lily both possessed an exceptional courage that I lacked. As far as I can recall, my obduracy wasn’t rooted in any heroic principle of loyalty to Lily. It was about me, and it was simple. Steve was a stranger to me. It would be embarrassing to have to meet him again and I was afraid that if I wasn’t careful, I might end up having to live once more with this man I neither knew nor liked. My greatest fear was not losing a father; it was having one.

Lily didn’t let up. Steve was my dad, she reminded me; a boy needed his father; I’d grow up regretting this missed opportunity. With hindsight, I can see that she was worried about what would happen to me if the heart condition killed
her. Steve would need to take responsibility for me, and for that to work I had to be reconciled with him. After the misery he’d inflicted upon Lily and Linda, who’d sought to protect her, they would have been far more entitled than I was to vehemently oppose the re-establishment of contact. Their magnanimity was remarkable, but it was lost on me.

Linda did go back to East Dulwich a few times, primarily to extract further funds from Steve – despite her appeal, the postal orders were few and far between. I never went with her, much to Lily’s chagrin. Our half-sister, Sandra, was born later in the year. Steve was, by all accounts, a model father this time around. As I say, credit where credit’s due.

Apart from helping Linda to prise some cash out of Steve, Jimmy Carter’s other main contribution to our family fortunes was introducing me to his older brother, Johnny.

Johnny was the eldest of the seven Carter siblings. He was in his mid-twenties and married with two small children. Tall and handsome – except when he laughed and revealed his bad teeth – he retained the look of the Teddy Boy he’d recently been. Johnny’s hair was a work of art. The style he wore was known as a Tony Curtis with a DA (duck’s arse, for anyone unfamiliar with the term, owing to the tapered shape of the hair at the back). He might once have shared his brother’s breezy good humour, but having become a father himself he took his position as eldest son very seriously. In fact he was a very serious man, quietly spoken and mature beyond his years. He could have been taken for Jimmy’s father rather than his brother.

Johnny had a reputation as a fighter and a man you’d be foolish to cross, though he was now pursuing a respectable occupation as a milkman in Notting Hill – a milkman in need of an assistant. I was given the job, for which I was to be paid 10 shillings (50p) to work all day Saturday (the busiest day of the week because that was when the money was collected) and until midday on Sunday, when the round was completed more quickly. I’d wait in the pre-dawn gloom for Johnny to fetch me in his Express Dairies milk float, which he’d pick up from the depot in St Charles Square.